Abstract : Due to the intense recent development of tomography techniques, the morphology of many real porous media is now known with a high spatial resolution. Only statistical methods allow the huge number of data issued from these experiments to be applied to radiation modeling. An original statistical approach for characterizing the radiative properties of a homogenized phase of a porous medium has been developed, initially by Tancrez and Taine. Many other works based on these approaches have been published in the last decade.In this statistical approach, extinction, absorption and scattering properties of a homogenized phase are directly, completely and accurately, characterized by radiative statistical distribution functions, instead of three scalars, i.e extinction, absorption and scattering coefficients: these latter quantities have a physical meaning only in the case of a Beerian homogenized phase. As the whole radiative distribution functions are accurately known, the Beerian assumption can be accurately validated or, often, not validated. Moreover a general scattering phase function, depending on both the incidence and scattering directions, is directly determined only from the physical laws assumed at local scale.